It was a Scientologist he'd befriended on the Net, he says, who gave him a copy of a letter from a church staffer named Elaine Siegel. Appalled by its content, he promptly posted it on alt.religion.scientology. Siegel identified herself as writing from the Office of Special Affairs International, which former insiders say is the church's security branch. Addressed to Scientologists on the Net, the letter suggested flooding the Net with positive messages about Scientology as a counter to criticism posted. It said, in part, "If you imagine 40 to 50 Scientologists posting on the Internet every few days, we'll just run the SPs right off the system. It will be quite simple." She ended with, "I would like to hear from you on your ideas to make the Internet a safe space for Scientology to expand into."

Church lawyer Helena Kobrin, asked later about the letter by e-mail, said, "Ms. Siegel's letter was not an official church policy." Things might be different now if the church had said so at the time. Through the summer of 1994, the letter was copied, and its widespread circulation heated the debate to yet another degree, bringing a new constituency into the newsgroup: people who wanted to defend the Net against what they saw as a threat to their freedom. Many of them knew nothing about Scientology except for that letter, and they were incensed. Other arrivals knew a lot about Scientology, and were incensed for different reasons. Chief among them was Dennis Erlich, who calls himself a minister and who provides "information and support to people who have been subjected to high-demand groups." He was a Scientologist for 15 years.

Erlich left the church in 1982 after what he describes as a failed attempt to reform it from within. "That made me persona non grata, and they couldn't work with me because I wouldn't follow orders anymore." He was declared an SP and has since devoted himself to debunking the church at every opportunity. Several of the newsgroup's old-timers say the tone changed when Erlich showed up in '94. He agrees - and he's proud of it. "People were discussing this stuff like it was some sort of tea party," he says disdainfully. His own views against the church are so vehement it's hard to imagine he could reach any sort of amicable agreement with Scientologists - or they with him. His critical posts, with quotations from the church literature, turned alt.religion.scientology from debating club to battlefield.

Duelling cancelbots

Shortly before Christmas 1994, messages started to mysteriously vanish from alt.religion.scientology. The contents of the missing messages are not known today. Many people believed they knew who was responsible, but gathering evidence and understanding what was happening were different tasks altogether.

Most Usenet newsreader software has built-in cancellation facilities. These are simple enough: the poster sends out a cancel-command message, often containing a brief explanation for the cancellation, which propagates around Usenet from server to server. The cancel command instructs the system to ignore the user's previously sent post, identified by a unique code assigned to every Usenet post when written. While the feature allows users to cancel their own posts, canceling somebody else's message is a little more complicated: the would-be censor has to forge the message to make it look as though it came from the original poster. It's not that hard to do if you know how.

There are legitimate - or at least Net-approved - reasons for forging cancellations. A loose collection of individuals known as the Cancelmoose, for example, removes spams, those mass mailings inappropriately posted all over the Net, usually for commercial purposes. When spurred by complaints in alt.current-events.net-abuse, the Cancelmoose typically culls messages posted to more than 25 newsgroups of widely varying content. Those who compose the Cancelmoose take open responsibility for their actions - in fact, they advertise them as a public service. The cancellations on alt.religion.scientology, however, were different. The messages that disappeared were sent to a single newsgroup, and no one ever claimed responsibility. So, this being the Net, a program was developed to get a look at what was being canceled. The program was called
Lazarus.